Mississippians are still using meth, but they're not manufacturing it

There was talk during the last legislative session about bringing back pseudoephedrine over the counter, which would resurrect meth labs in Mississippi. This is a grave concern, officials said.
Therese Apel/ Clarion Ledger

Home grown meth labs are scarce in Mississippi after 2010 legislation called for pseudoephedrine to be scheduled.(Photo11: Therese Apel/ Clarion Ledger)

Two Mississippi children were found living in a doghouse with their dog.

The reason? Their parents were cooking methamphetamine inside the house and the power was cut off. The children had to bundle up with the dog to stay warm, said Public Safety Commissioner Marshall Fisher, who was the director of the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics at the time.

That was in 2010 before the Mississippi Legislature passed a bill the same year, signed into law, requiring a prescription to buy pseudoephedrine, the primary ingredient in the manufacture of methamphetamine.

That kind of neglect and abuse is common and deadly in homes affected by meth addiction, officials say. In the days of widespread meth labs before the 2010 bill was passed, the dangers of poisoning and explosions were also immediate threats to families in homes where the drug was being manufactured.

Recent talk by some lawmakers of rolling back that restriction is chilling to those who remember the manpower devoted to hundreds of meth lab cleanups because they also know the addictive draw of the drug.

The insidious threat is tied directly to what meth can do to the psyche of the user at the expense of family, job, morals, even sustenance. To the user, all pale in comparison to getting the next fix.

"Meth surpasses water, air, food, everything that’s important for survival because all of those behaviors are associated with dopamine release," said addiction specialist Dr. Scott Hambleton. "Those are natural rewards, that’s how the brain functions to guarantee survival of the species. The concentration of dopamine (produced by meth) is so large it sears the brain.

"(Meth users) go on binges where they won’t eat or sleep, and they take the drug for several days in a row. Anything that interferes with that drug use is almost a threat to survival," he said. "That includes taking care of children or going to work — it threatens the ability to get this high again."

"We are in the midst of an opioid crisis, and it’s horrible, but meth is not just on the comeback trail. It’s here and it’s big and it’s a threat right now," Fisher said. "And talking to people in treatment, those professionals said it’s one of the hardest drugs to kick."

It's been the better part of a decade since meth labs were commonplace in Mississippi, but it is still the second-leading cause of overdose deaths in the state behind opioids, officials said. According to a 2015 report from the U.S. Sentencing Commission, meth offenders made up the highest proportion of federal drug offenders in 27 states.

The decline of the Mississippi meth lab

Though some people found the prescription requirement inconvenient, it halted the homegrown meth production within the state almost overnight.

"It's an extremely dangerous drug," Hambleton said. "They say the goal (of unscheduling pseudoephedrine) would be to help people with allergy-related symptoms so they don’t have to go through the inconvenience of a prescription, but if they were aware of the horrific consequences of meth use, they’d change their stance. At least that’s my hope."

Scheduling the drug didn't completely stop cartel meth from coming into the state, but law enforcement officials say it reduced the dangers in Mississippi of manufacturing, taking, and cleaning up homegrown meth. Both kinds are addictive, destructive, and deadly but the makeup of cartel meth tends to be much more pure.

"We never said meth would completely go away, but we were definitely successful in taking away the toxic waste sites," Fisher said.

Sen. Michael Watson, R-Pascagoula, urged during the 2018 legislative session that the ban on pseudoephedrine be looked at over the summer, allowing lawmakers to deal with it again in 2019. He said that it can take half a day for a parent to visit the doctor to get a prescription for a child’s runny nose.

Watson said he is aware that law enforcement would be opposed to any change in the ban on over-the-counter pseudoephedrine products, but he argued that since people are now able to get meth from the cartels, it makes the need for meth labs obsolete.

Yet the contrast of half a day at the doctor and the impact home-cooked methamphetamines have inside the home cannot be ignored.

"If the legislation is repealed, there’s no telling how many labs we’ll start seeing again. Other states are still seeing the problems with meth labs," said Lt. Eddie Hawkins, MBN's methamphetamine field coordinator.

When the drug was primarily homegrown before July 2010, the affects on families were horrific: Agents worked cases in which children were traded as sex payment for Sudafed, Fisher said. One 4-year-old child he knew of had a sexually transmitted disease she had contracted from her father, a meth addict. And they were not exceptions.

Fisher said he was told by family judges that when children were taken away from parents who were cooking meth, almost none — if not none — of the parents ever petitioned the court to get their children back.

"With homegrown meth, they often mix in household chemicals like Drano — you saw that a lot — and battery acid, and there are a lot of adverse health effects because of the ingredients that are mixed together," Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics Director John Dowdy said. "It can cause all types of medical problems."

Another problem is that meth is already fairly low-priced on the street compared to other illegal drugs, selling at around $350-$400 an ounce. If homegrown meth labs began to crop up again, it would drive the price down even further as there would be a lot more meth available on the street than there is now.

And authorities said that's what would happen — meth labs will return to the Magnolia state.

The Mississippi Bureau of NMeth Labs?

In the year before the substance was controlled, MBN agents worked 754 meth labs in Mississippi. Before the law went into effect, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy reported Mississippi had one of the highest rates of meth lab incidents in the country.

In 2018, MBN has worked two, one of which was a dump site near the Alabama state line.

"It got better overnight," Hawkins said of the 2010 legislation.

Only four senators voted against the 2010 bill. They were Sens. John Horhn, D-Jackson; Walter Michel, R-Jackson; Willie Simmons, D-Cleveland; and Chris McDaniel, R-Ellisville.

As dramatic as the success of scheduling the drug was, the recoil of putting it back over the counter could be just as drastic, officials said.

"MBN is the only agency certified to clean those labs. What we were dealing with was two or three agents diverted to work a lab somewhere, and sometimes the cleanup could take 10-18 hours," Dowdy said. "That’s two or three bodies that could be involved in normal investigation who have to be suited up and going through the cleanup process in addition to doing the investigation associated with that meth lab."

A cleanup company had to be called to remove the items from the scene, Hawkins said. With sometimes three or four meth labs a day around the state, that cost taxpayers not only for the cleanup, but also for the extra hours agents had to work.

"An agent would call in, and we’d call a cleanup company to remove the items. Unfortunately for us, he may be the third on the list. He may be in north Mississippi and they may be on the Coast, so he’s waiting up to 18 hours while they get there," Hawkins said. "So the overtime expense was astronomical from having to fund all these meth lab cleanups."

What that looks like for the understaffed MBN is that the meth labs would take agents off investigations and put them on meth lab cleanups, essentially neutering drug enforcement on the state level.

MBN has about 70 active field agents. Roughly 25 of them are trained to deal with meth labs.

"It’s concerning to me that there would be any consideration of decontrolling pseudoephedrine at this point, because we’re not in a position with the numbers we have to adequately address those concerns that would arise," Dowdy said. "If we had to go back to 600-700 meth labs in the state, we’d have to cut all our investigative activities down because all we’d be able to do is work meth labs."

Agents with MBN, in addition to working on prescription drug and pharmacy diversion cases and aiding other local and state agencies in fighting the opioid epidemic, are working on task forces with the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. marshals, the FBI, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to bring down drug trafficking organizations such as cartels and gangs. An agent may be involved in investigations on 10 to 12 drug trafficking organizations at once, Dowdy said.

That's a lot of work, but it's all very important to the mission of the agency, he said.

"When you talk about trying to infiltrate a drug trafficking organization, you want to cut the head off the snake, but you also have to work with the mid-level people associated with that group so that when you dismantle the organization, there’s a void left in terms of individuals that could step in and take over that particular organization," he said.

Their efforts also target violent crimes, Dowdy said.

"Most of the time drug trafficking organizations have some gang affiliation, and that ramps up the danger for agents working undercover. The violence associated with drug trafficking is astronomical."

Other answers

To date, Mississippi and Oregon are the only states that require prescriptions for previously over-the-counter cold and sinus medications.

In July 2006, Oregon became the first state to require a prescription for products containing pseudoephedrine and ephedrine. The state experienced a similar decrease in meth labs, but some officials said it started when they passed a law a few years before that simply required an ID to purchase the medications.

In 2017, lawmakers in Oregon also tried to overturn the law that requires a prescription, but it was unsuccessful.

Hambleton and others stress there are reasonable over-the-counter substitutes for pseudoephedrine if it's really that much of an inconvenience to see a doctor. One of those is phenyletherine, sold over the counter in Sudafed PE.

"If you go to the cough and cold section and can't find it, ask your pharmacist where decongestants are," Hambleton said. "There are many available. They may not work quite as well, but I think with what we just talked about, much caution is warranted."

In a 2014 letter to the Tennessean, retired pharmacist Alvin Clark wrote, "Some people don’t use (phenyletherine) because it does not 'feel like it is working.' But it is working; it just does not give a 'buzz.'”

"Meth — with the exception of carfentanyl — it’s got to be one of the most dangerous drugs we’ve ever encountered, period," he said. "That inconvenience of a prescription is really worth it to society."